Also known as Assault Suit Valken!
Leynos' successor is IMMEDIATELY a huge face-lift, bring an astronomically larger budget and infinitely more balanced pool of systems and concepts. The SNES control layout is put to great use with a strafe-based weapons system that really makes you feel like an unstoppable tank. Powerups and new weapons are also found in the stages instead of being given as rank-based rewards after a mission. You would think mandatory exploration would ruin the flow of action, but Cybernator makes it work by letting you totally 'roid yourself as early as the second stage. The level 3 vulcan and laser feel amazing.
I'd recommend the JP version if you can - with a caveat: The current retranslation patch on romhacking.net has a bug where some tiles in the 6th stage's upper route are replaced with walls. I took this path and savestated, softlocking myself and forcing a clean reset. But despite this, the retranslation is still the way to go: It's a much more appropriately tense and OVA-esque script, and there's lots of expressive character portraits that got scrubbed from the US version for some reason ("the americans HATE anime prettyboys >:[[[[["). The US translation also scrubs most of the incidental dialogue for generic quips - stuff like 'roger', 'mission complete', 'return to base', 'we'll pay for your education if you bomb these innocent villages'. Last one felt a bit out of place.
I think the only thing missing from Valken is that the macro-scale depiction of global conflict feels heavily subdued. Despite all its problems, I admire Leynos 1 in its ability to make you feel like one disposable soldier amidst a larger legion, taking on impossible, merciless odds. Valken's function focus keeps the conflict mostly on-ground and largely pretends the rest of your team doesn't exist. It's power fantasy over disempowerment defiance. Still a better-feeling game, but it blends in the larger crowd of 'badass dudehero run-and-gun' games on thematic terms.
Assault Suit Leynos 2 is next on the menu whenever I buy a Saturn. Someday! I swear!!!
Leynos' successor is IMMEDIATELY a huge face-lift, bring an astronomically larger budget and infinitely more balanced pool of systems and concepts. The SNES control layout is put to great use with a strafe-based weapons system that really makes you feel like an unstoppable tank. Powerups and new weapons are also found in the stages instead of being given as rank-based rewards after a mission. You would think mandatory exploration would ruin the flow of action, but Cybernator makes it work by letting you totally 'roid yourself as early as the second stage. The level 3 vulcan and laser feel amazing.
I'd recommend the JP version if you can - with a caveat: The current retranslation patch on romhacking.net has a bug where some tiles in the 6th stage's upper route are replaced with walls. I took this path and savestated, softlocking myself and forcing a clean reset. But despite this, the retranslation is still the way to go: It's a much more appropriately tense and OVA-esque script, and there's lots of expressive character portraits that got scrubbed from the US version for some reason ("the americans HATE anime prettyboys >:[[[[["). The US translation also scrubs most of the incidental dialogue for generic quips - stuff like 'roger', 'mission complete', 'return to base', 'we'll pay for your education if you bomb these innocent villages'. Last one felt a bit out of place.
I think the only thing missing from Valken is that the macro-scale depiction of global conflict feels heavily subdued. Despite all its problems, I admire Leynos 1 in its ability to make you feel like one disposable soldier amidst a larger legion, taking on impossible, merciless odds. Valken's function focus keeps the conflict mostly on-ground and largely pretends the rest of your team doesn't exist. It's power fantasy over disempowerment defiance. Still a better-feeling game, but it blends in the larger crowd of 'badass dudehero run-and-gun' games on thematic terms.
Assault Suit Leynos 2 is next on the menu whenever I buy a Saturn. Someday! I swear!!!
C_F
1 year ago
This happened to me.